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The hungry sheep of Australian rugby are unfed
ALAN JONES
RADIO BROADCASTER
6 MINUTES AGO OCTOBER 5, 2018
NO COMMENTS
John Milton was a 17th Century English poet, writing at a time of religious and political upheaval. His poem Lycidas is a lament for a friend drowned in the Irish seas. The narrator in the poem is an unnamed shepherd.
Milton’s tone grows harsh towards unfit shepherds, who don’t protect Milton’s anti-protestant cause. So Milton protests: “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed.”
And so it is with Australian rugby. After last Saturday’s defeat by South Africa, there is not one rugby supporter who doesn’t feel, in Milton’s language, “unfed”. And we are all asking, what the hell is going on?
We are now ranked seventh in the world. That was before our defeat on Saturday. Ahead of us are New Zealand, Ireland, Wales, England, South Africa and Scotland, do you mind. Biting on our heels are France and Argentina. We could finish up ninth.
But how do you solve a problem if you don’t admit there is one?
No one should doubt the courage, the capacity or the commitment of the young men chosen to represent Australia. Indeed, their defensive efforts, week after week, are proof of that commitment; proof that they understand the legacy they inherit and their responsibility to the honour that the jersey bestows. But the issue is not one of defence.
Nor is the answer to throw coach Michael Cheika under the proverbial bus.
But given the almost siege mentality of the board and the CEO of Rugby Australia, it is clear they will do anything to hang on to their positions and do this by blaming someone else for the mess.
One very observant senior rugby official wrote to me recently: “I watched some NRC over the weekend and there on the screen at Concord Oval, enjoying corporate hospitality were (Rugby Australian chairman Cameron) Clyne, (RA board member Brett) Robinson and (RA CEO Raelene) Castle entertaining Bill Beaumont (a World Rugby heavyweight).
“One can only imagine how they may have sold out Australia again. Clyne, Robinson and (Bill) Pulver sold out Australia when they allowed Argentina and Japan into Super Rugby and then were key players in the removal of the Western Force.”
The public are not stupid.
But back to the Wallabies. It is the All Blacks who demonstrate that the most powerful defensive tool you have on the paddock is your attack. At the end of the day, it is no use gilding the lily. I have said many times we are playing the wrong kind of football. Our attack is anything but attack.
If you are uninitiated with the game, but just love it, then grab hold of a video of Saturday’s match, or any recent Wallaby game, and see how many times the ball-carrier runs as far as he can, barges into someone and then hits the deck.
Commentators will tell you the ball is then “recycled” so that someone else can do the same thing over and over again. On Saturday, we seemed to have another strategy and that was to hoist the ball wide and hope.
We actually got two tries. But that’s not running rugby. You can’t run when you’re on the ground. And we voluntarily go to the ground. We don’t attempt to stand up.
We have some of the biggest men in world rugby. Why would we want to go to the ground every time an opposition player breathes on us?
The best teams make sure there is a support player either side of the ball carrier. And the ball carrier is thinking of options, not just blindly crashing to the ground when he confronts the next defender.
As you can see from the video, when this happens, opposition forwards just line up across the paddock and there is an impenetrable wall facing our most attacking players.
The object of the forwards must be to break down that wall. Or, to put it another way, how do you get those forwards out of the backline?
The answer is simple. You play more of the ball in the air than you do on the ground. That’s called “maul ball”.
And in this way, your forwards can suck the opposition forwards out of the defensive backline. If the opposition forwards want to stay there, well, your maul will rumble down the paddock. And the crowd will cheer.
If, on the other hand, you are forced to go to the ground and the ball is “recycled” to another forward running off the ruck, the defence must always know there is a chance of the attack unloading the ball either side of the ball carrier.
This puts enormous pressure on the defence. It keeps them guessing. It has the enduring capacity of breaking up the defence. That is what is called “running rugby”.
That interchange within forwards and among our big men has been abandoned so that when we run out of ideas, or territorial advantage, we kick the football.
In a good team, with many options, the ball carrier may well kick as the best of all considered options. But the kick should never be designed to hand the ball back to the other side. Make no mistake, we have talented players. They are multi-skilled.
We have an attack coach — and I don’t subscribe to this business of head coach, attack coach, defence coach, kicking coach, skills coach. All of this must surely confuse the players.
I noted in the program for the Australia v All Blacks game at Eden Park, we had 18 support staff for the Wallabies.
What the hell. And we are broke. But if we do have an attack coach, someone needs to explain to the supporters what attack we are getting from the Wallabies, because we show a pronounced inability to score. In 2017, we averaged 31 points a game; in 2018 it is 16.
New Zealand are averaging six tries a game; South Africa 3.1; Argentina 2.4; Australia 2. So what? Replace Cheika with the attack coach. And that’s Stephen Larkham. Is someone kidding? What’s the saying about “out of the frying pan, into the fire?’’
The use of the football is letting us down badly. And at the end of the day, the players are only playing the way they are told to play.
But there is a wider problem. In the past week, the news has been dominated by the sacking of the managing director of the ABC Michelle Guthrie and the subsequent resignation of the chairman.
Basically, at issue was the inability of the administration of the ABC to do what the ABC, under statute, is charged with doing. But Guthrie, in charge of the ABC, wasn’t a journalist and had no journalistic experience.
There is a person in charge of Australian Rugby who knows nothing about rugby. As with Guthrie, she therefore can’t identify the problems and obviously won’t know how to solve them.
The ABC has a simple charter, defined by the Act where under 8(1)(c), the ABC has a duty “to ensure that news and information is accurate, impartial and objective”.
Surely the CEO of Rugby Australia must have an impartial, accurate and objective understanding of the game, of how it’s run and how to evaluate the results. How the hell could she make any intelligent observation about what went on at Port Elizabeth on Saturday? Does she know the difference between a ruck and a maul?
And if, as at the ABC, the managing director acts in accordance with board directions, what directions is Castle being given by the Rugby Australia board?
The Rugby Australia board and the board of the ABC have one thing in common. No one on the ABC, with the exception of the staff representative, has any media experience. Not one. None.
Well, what of the board of Rugby Australia? They have no coaching experience. There are two internationals on the board, along with several women. The internationals must be in blind denial.
We also have the spectacle of public television commentators being employees of Rugby Australia.
How does that allow for objectivity, accuracy and impartiality?
So if the ABC is in crisis, as it most certainly is, and page after page of print media coverage attests to this, then the crisis in rugby is represented differently in the media. You have to go about 15 pages in from the back page before you can even find any rugby coverage.
How many people got up in excitement to watch the game at 1.10am on Sunday? And if that is the level of public interest, what will the broadcast rights be worth when they come up for negotiation in fewer than two years?
I said at the outset, the hungry sheep look up and are not fed. The rugby hungry sheep are being ignored. People are calling for the board of the ABC to go.
Rugby fans, those left, are calling for the board of Rugby Australia to go.
How much failure is enough before they look in the mirror and say this rugby fish, like all fish, is rotting from the head.
You can’t solve a problem if you’re not prepared to admit there is one.
But what is worse, you can’t solve a problem if you don’t know what it is, let alone known what the answers are.